Seafood is healthy and the world wants more. Too bad that most wild fisheries are overfished and collapsing. Over the last few dec­ades, aquaculture has begun to offer a solution to this difficulty, but it’s not a solution that wins universal acclaim. In New Zealand, the black floats that mark mussel farms (above)—our main form of aqua­culture—are often considered an eyesore and an impediment to our unfettered access to sea and shore. But while locals are apprehensive, government and the industry have an eye to expansion.

Magazine

Mar - Apr 2007

The 10-year -old Maori boy was con­spicuous by his rebellious attitude the moment he stepped off the bus. He was visiting the Tawhiti Mu­seum, on the outskirts of Hawera in south Taranaki, along with eight classes of primary school students. Within seconds, he had scrunched up the worksheet that was to steer the students through their stud­ies that day. Museum owner and former teacher, Nigel Ogle, says, "I could see the way the teachers were reacting that this boy was one to he watched."

I Wonder how many New Zealand Geographic readers would recognise these lines:
"There are strange things done in the midnight sun By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold..."
It wouldn't surprise me if some could go on to recite The Cremation of Sam McGee in its entirety. It is 100 years since Sam McGee was published—a ballad that, along with the The Shooting of Dan McGrew and a handful of others in Songs of a Sourdough, earned its author, Robert Service, overnight fortune and fame.
My introduction to the Bard of the Yukon came cour­tesy of Mrs McLeod, my drama teacher in Standard One at Owairaka Primary. (Those were the days of primers and standards—now replaced by the bland "Year X.") She was a formidable presence. From her rouged cheeks to her flamboyant clothing to her sonorous elocution, she was nothing if not dramatic. To a seven-year-old, she was unforgettable.
I was fortunate to have many such teachers who thought children should be taught to recite. So we solemn­ly intoned Kipling's paean to Auckland—"Last, loneliest, loveliest, exquisite, apart"—and declaimed with tragic intensity "The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees," and feigned mysterious in "Slowly, silently, now the moon / Walks the night in her silver shoon"— amused then, as now, by that archaic word.
But it was Service who opened the door to a Boy's Own world of mushing and gold-grubbing, of cold that "stabs like a driven nail" and silence that "bludgeons you dumb." A world in equal parts beautiful and dangerous, savage and free:
"The strong life that never knows harness;
The wilds where the caribou call;
The freshness, the freedom, the farness-
O God! How I'm stuck on it all."
Canada's vagabond of verse has accompanied me on many a backcountry tramp. My copy of The Spell of the Yukon is permanently warped and watermarked from a drenching in the Makarora. But the grip of the words is potent still:
"They have cradled you in custom, they have primed you with their preaching,They have soaked you in convention through and through;They have put you in a showcase; you're a credit to their teaching—But can't you hear the Wild?—it's calling you."Of course, the New Zealand tramper has no need to look to a Canadian for inspiration. There are plenty of poets closer to home to liven the night-time korero in a mountain but or around a drift­wood fire. One might quote Glov­er's "Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle / The magpies said." Or Baxter:
"Upon the upland road
Ride easy, stranger:
Surrender to the sky
Your heart of anger."
But balladeers like Service (who never considered himself a real poet, merely a versifier and a rhymester) hold their own in such luminous company. The rhythms suit the hours of uphill trudging and downhill striding, and the stories conjure the pioneering past.
In Shining with the Shiner, John A. Lee wrote about one all-night campfire session with a group of swagmen. Each recited, and no one judged the offerings for literary merit, for if a poem "had the flavour did it matter if it was Banjo Bill, Henry Lawson, David McKee Wright?" For his part, Lee's rapscallion hero, Shiner Slattery, dances a jig while singing this ditty:
"I picked up my hat,
And I spat on my stick,
And out on the road
Like a deer I did flit;
I buttoned my coat,
And I kindled my pipe
And I off like a hare
In the morning."
With summer upon us and the backcountry beckon­ing, don't overlook that book of favourite verses when you pack. The poet Robert Pinsky said: "The longer I live, the more I see there's something about reciting rhythmical words aloud—it's almost biological—that comforts and enlivens human beings."
The appeal of Service—a bank manager who "cheer­fully exchanged the bondage of a settled existence for vagabondage"—is that he wrote both rollicking bar-room ballads and soul-stirring anthems to what he called "the Vastness", the unfathomable world of nature. Of the two, it was the latter he wanted to be remembered for. Late in his life he wrote: "To see the ordinary with eyes of marvel may be a gift; or it may be there is no ordinary, and wonder is the true vision."
Note: There is an excellent reading of The Cremation of Sam McGee on the video site YouTube—go to www.youtube. com/watch?v=61Bkuz1TIVc
Kennedy Warne was the founding editor of New Zealand Geographic and served as editor until the end of 2003. He now writes articles for New Zealand Geographic (most re­cently on moose and the Poor Knights) and the American, National Geographic, but is still awaiting an assignment to the Yukon.

After unfulfilled hype that surround­ed the passage of several comets in recent decades, Comet McNaught was a pleasant surprise. It was im­pressively visible from mid-January into early February and can likely still be found with binoculars as it heads away from the Sun towards the outer solar system. Its closest approach to the Sun (perihelion) was on January 12, and like many comets that get fairly near the Sun, it was brighter as it started to move away. This is because the sun's heat causes ice—the main component of comets—to sublimate from the outer skin of the comet and the closer to the sun it gets, the more material is given off. As the ice sublimates, dust is also released. More particles make for a bigger tail, the most strik­ing part of the spectacle. That said, particles in the tail are very sparsely distributed and it is sunlight reflecting off them—like dust motes in a room—that makes the tail visible.

The kingdom of Tonga has been in the news recently for political in­stability; but for much longer Tonga has been the subject of another kind of instability—geological. Tonga is a prime cruising destination, and recent geological events there have provided some interesting experi­ences for sailors.

January 26, 2007 marked a special occasion for New Zealand's royal family. After seventy years of breed­ing on Taiaroa Head at the entrance to Otago Harbour, the northern royal albatrosses have hatched their 500th chick—a tribute to the dedication of not only the birds, but also the hu­mans who have watched over them.

Confrontations between Japanese whalers and anti-whaling protesters in Antarctica’s Ross Sea have put the Balleny Islands in the news lately. It is a spotlight to which they are unaccustomed. Fewer than 30 landings have been made on these remotest islands in the 168 years since they were discovered. These are not the kind of islands on which celebrity Survivor television is made (unfortunately). Far, far to the south of our subantarctic islands, they constitute 400 square kilometres of rock and ice cocooned in gales, freezing ocean and icebergs.

Ben Todhunter farms Cleardale Station in the Rakaia Gorge and is co-chair of the High Country Accord, an advocacy group for high country farmers. He was a 2006 Nuffield scholar and is a former chairman of the South Island High Country Com­mittee of Federated Farmers.

Although he is best remembered for the Underwater World on Auckland's waterfront which still carries his name 22 years after his death, that project was just the last in a life brimming with adventure, discovery, originality and zest.

As 2006 came to an end, stories of record warmth around the world contrasted strongly with the cold temperatures New Zealand expe­rienced in December. Averaged over the whole country, the month was 1.9°C below the long-term average. Although nationwide it was not the coldest December on record—December 2004, for exam­ple, was 0.3°C colder again—many places had their coldest Decembers. Among the places that had the cold­est December on record, or equal coldest, were the airports of Kaitaia, Whangarei, Auckland, Hamilton, Taupo, Palmerston North, Para­paraumu, Wellington and Blenheim. In most of these places records only began in the 1960s or 70s. How­ever, the Wellington suburb of Kel­burn, where records began in 1928, also had its coldest December.